


At the Seams

by pendrecarc



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Body Horror, Dubious Consent Due To Identity Issues, F/M, Other, Statement, Statement Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-17
Updated: 2018-11-17
Packaged: 2019-08-16 18:33:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,999
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16500572
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pendrecarc/pseuds/pendrecarc
Summary: Statement of Tim Stoker regarding a one-night stand with his coworker.





	At the Seams

**Author's Note:**

  * For [spacehopper](https://archiveofourown.org/users/spacehopper/gifts).



> Many thanks to B. for the beta read and britpick!

For the record, I don’t want this on the record. I didn’t want to tell anyone about it, much less you, Jon—assuming you ever listen to this.

But I want to make sure someone has this photo, and I didn’t want to file it away without an explanation.

To get the embarrassing part out of the way, I slept with Sasha. When she wasn’t Sasha. And when I say ‘embarrassing’ I mean I slept with something that belonged to the thing that took my brother, while it was wearing a face I thought belonged to a friend, and thinking about that makes me want to peel off my own skin.

It would have been—God. Almost exactly a year ago, right when I’d come back to work after that mess with Jane Prentiss. Jon was still on leave. Martin was even worse about him than usual, but at least he’d moved out of the archives and back into his own flat. I was getting better, too, by which I mean the holes in my face had stopped leaking. And Sasha was—the thing is I want to say she seemed normal. I thought she’d bounced back a lot quicker than the rest of us, which made sense, since she wasn’t the one who’d found a body or had worms squirming around inside her. She seemed, you know. Levelheaded. Not really upset by everything that had happened, and she didn’t mind listening to Martin go on about it. She smiled when I tried to joke about it, though I’ll admit I wasn’t on my best form.

And it felt like that was Sasha just being Sasha. Except I don’t know what she was like, do I? Maybe if it was really her she’d’ve been going on benders or crying at her desk or telling me off for trying to make her laugh. But at the time I was just glad she’d held herself together even when the rest of us had been close to losing it.

It was my idea to go for a pint that evening. We used to do it every month or so before Martin started sleeping in the archives. Sometimes one of the researchers I used to work with came along, and once or twice even Jon, but usually it was just me and Martin and Sasha, and I thought it would help to get back to some kind of routine. So we went to the place near work that Martin and I liked and Sasha tolerated, got a booth in the back where we could talk about whatever weird stuff we wanted without too many people listening in, and by the time Martin got the second round it was starting to feel almost normal.

It’d been a slow week. I mean everything seemed calmer once the police had cleared out, but usually we have at least a few researchers stopping in to ask if we have something on file, or someone visiting the Institute to make a statement. That week, nothing. I spent it digitizing what statements I could, then followed up on the files Jon had set aside before the walls started raining worms. Usually I’d’ve been bored out of my mind, but just then the quiet didn’t seem so bad.

I’d been working on the recordings, which meant lots of fast-forwarding through mp3 files trying to cross-reference other statements and search for keywords some of the researchers had sent us. The fact that we’d gotten those statements on mp3 at all meant they weren’t worth the time, but Research wanted it done anyway, and nothing takes your mind off your own troubles like hearing some poor sod describe his near-death by spontaneous combustion. (Martin followed up on that one. It was definitely a cigarette he’d left burning.) Most of those files had started out on Sasha’s computer, but that kept crashing, and she was waiting on a replacement. We were whinging about the limitations of modern technology. In retrospect I think IT would call being operated by an eldritch abomination some kind of user error, but at the time I had no idea what the real problem was.

I’d spent most of the day trying to find a family portrait mentioned in one of the statements, which we were meant to have photocopied and tucked away somewhere. Sasha said it ought properly to have been scanned and saved as an addendum in the correct folder, if we had anything approaching a logical file structure for our digital materials, which of course we didn’t. This got me and Martin started on an old debate about visual records of supernatural phenomena, and whether Jackie from HR had really taken a selfie with one of Trevor Herbert’s vampires like she claimed. And that reminded me of Martin’s camera.

He’d brought it in the same week Jon started using that goddamned tape recorder, thinking it would work on the same principle. Can’t use a computer to record someone’s voice talking about supernatural events, maybe you can’t use it to store reliable photographic evidence of the supernatural, either. So he went out and bought an old polaroid camera from a vintage shop. I guess the film’s still available online, presumably because that’s the sort of thing hipsters will spend their money on. Martin wanted to take headshots of everyone who came in to give a statement and photos of any physical evidence they had with them, before it got sent up to artefact storage. So, naturally, I thought we should test the camera out ourselves.

I used three or four packs of the film before Martin told me how much it’d cost, and that he hadn’t gotten approval to put it in the archive budget yet. Most of the shots were terrible—the archive isn’t really lit for a photo shoot—but that was the day Martin brought the dog in, so there was plenty of material. I also got a few good candids of Jon eating lunch before he realised he had brown sauce all down his chin.

Anyway, we were sitting there in the pub, and Sasha hadn’t been saying much, so I mentioned that day to lighten the mood. A reminder of a time before worms and gunshot victims, back when the worst we had to complain about was our boss and the crap ventilation in the archives. And it worked, too. Martin brightened right up, and Sasha was definitely interested. “I forgot all about that,” she said. “What happened to those photos?”

I had to think for a minute, but then I remembered I’d brought them home after Jon complained about them cluttering up the counter in what passes for our kitchen. I don’t know why I didn’t just toss them. Maybe I thought they’d be good for a laugh.

I don’t remember much of what we talked about after that. Not because I’d had too much to drink—I don’t think I ever got far into my third pint—but because Martin and I wound up circling the drain of the same conversations we’d been having for ages, about whether we should chuck it all and quit, and there wasn’t much that was interesting enough to remember. Sasha caught my eye with this sympathetic sort of look, even though she never seemed all that interested in leaving the archives herself, so for all I could tell she agreed with Martin. But then she was buying him another round, and then another, with what I thought at the time was a misguided instinct to let him talk it all out. The result was that we had to practically pour him into a cab. She told the driver his address, now that I think of it. It didn’t occur to me to wonder how she knew where he lived.

So then Sasha and I were standing outside the pub together. I said something about what a chilly night it’d turned out to be, and she shivered, but a little too late, like she’d needed the reminder to do it. Then she asked if I was going to wear my jumper, or if she could borrow it on the walk to the Tube. I said fine, and she smiled at me and pulled it on. When she put her arms over her head her shirt rode up and showed a few inches of skin. It looked so smooth, like it was begging to be felt. I don’t even mean sexually. I mean—have you ever seen a statue in a museum and had to stop yourself reaching out to touch it, just because it was there?

She caught me looking. I’d usually have pretended nothing had happened and would have expected her to pretend she hadn’t noticed. I’d flirted a bit with Sasha, but never with intent, because yeah, I enjoy a good time, and I’m not above mixing business with a bit of pleasure, but we’re around each other enough in the archives that it could get awkward quickly. God knows there’s enough of that going on here already. So I was surprised when she looked straight back at me and smiled again, very deliberate, and started walking along the pavement, clearly expecting me to catch her up. I think I’m making it sound more inviting than it was. The smile hadn’t been seductive, and it wasn’t a ‘love to watch her leave’ kind of walk. But I had no doubts about what she meant.

I was slower to respond than I would have been a month earlier. I said the holes in my face had stopped leaking, but they’re not pretty, and they aren’t just in my face. Stunning physique and well-earned confidence aside, I hadn’t exactly been eager to show the rest of them off. The clerk from the medical examiner’s office had tried texting for a couple of weeks after the Prentiss incident, but I’d kept putting him off until he’d given up, and I hadn’t gotten out much in the meantime, so I was settling into what you might call a dry spell. I thought I was fine with that. At least, that’s what I kept telling myself until we got to the Tube and Sasha bypassed the platform for the Central line to head straight for my train. I don’t think anything would have happened if she’d expected me to make a move, and I never did. She just came along back to mine.

And then we had sex, like I said.

I spent the whole time not quite sure if it was actually happening, which I can tell you is _not_ my usual approach to taking someone home. She took her clothes off the second the door was locked, my jumper and her shirt and bra and everything else right down to her socks, and started kissing me like she was fascinated to know what the inside of my mouth tasted like. That kind of approach can be hot or creepy, or both if you’re into that sort of thing, but by that point I felt like I was having an out-of-body experience, and not in a good way. Which was unfortunate, because my body seemed like it would be an excellent place to be just then. I said I’d never wanted to make things awkward, but there’d always been something about Sasha, and I’d always—

Maybe that’s not true, either. I hate that I don’t know how much of it was true.

She was sliding her hands up and down my sides, and when she went to hook them under the waist of my trousers I tried to stop her, to tell her about the scars. They were still healing, still a bit—raw. “That’s all right,” she said. “Remember, I saw you and Jon when they were fresh. And I like to see all the seams.” Then she kissed me again, and it’s not like I was _trying_ to put her off.

She put on the condom herself. I remember that. She said she enjoyed feeling it slide on. And she said—she said she’d enjoy peeling it off again, too.

I’m not going to talk about the sex itself. That’s not the point. While it was happening it felt like we were there all night, but when it was done I looked at the clock and it had barely been half an hour since we arrived at my flat. Under any other circumstances that would be the most humiliating part of this story. Sasha seemed well satisfied, though. I don’t say that with any pride. I’m not sure what she got out of the experience, but looking back I don’t think I could take any credit for it even if I wanted to.

I was going to offer her some water or a clean shirt to sleep in, but before I could even ask if she wanted to stay she turned away from me and went to sleep. I settled in behind her with an arm around her waist. It was the softest skin I’d ever touched, but oddly cool. Her hair was sort of pushed up in back, trapped between her head and the pillow, and I could see the place it met the nape of her neck in the light from the window. I stared at that line between hair and flesh until I fell asleep, and the last waking thought I had was to wonder what she’d meant about seeing the seams.

I don’t usually remember my dreams. Probably just as well, considering. So the details of what I dreamed that night are fuzzy, but I know I was on an empty stage under bright lights making love to someone who seemed like a man one moment and a woman the next. There were oddly-shaped figures moving around in the darkness just outside the stage lights, and I couldn’t tell if they were stagehands or the audience or actors waiting to make their entrance. My partner had the face of a woman I didn’t recognise but thought I should, and their voice sounded almost like my brother Danny’s.

When I woke up the next morning, I was alone in the bed, and I could hear the shower running. All the scarred-over holes in my body hurt. Not the way things hurt when they’re healing, but like they’d been pulled back open. Like someone had been trying to get inside.

Sasha came out of the bathroom a few minutes later, dressed in her own clothes. She didn’t want breakfast or anything else. She just smiled the same smile from the night before and said she’d see me at work.

I went into the bathroom myself and looked into the mirror for a good quarter of an hour, until the steam had faded from her shower. The scars hadn’t opened up, and they weren’t bleeding, even though they felt like they should be. After I’d stared at my own face for a little too long, it started looking just a bit wrong, until I couldn’t remember whether my eyelids had always been exactly that shape, or whether the left side of my mouth had always been a little higher than the right. Like the way a word stops looking real if you keep reading it over and over again. And I kept thinking back to the night before and how _off_ everything had seemed, but it never once occurred to me that it was Sasha’s fault.

I called in sick and spent the morning in bed like I was nursing a hangover. Martin didn’t go in, either. I suppose he really was hungover. With Jon out of the office, I wonder what she got up to, there on her own.

Sasha never brought that night up again. I’d have been fine with that, but it should have been a nice thing to have between us, you know? Not something we’d need to talk about, not something we’d ever need to repeat, but we should’ve caught one another’s eye occasionally at work and known we were both remembering it fondly. But she never gave any indication she was thinking about it, and I tried not to think about it much myself.

And when we found out what had really happened to Sasha—well, like I said. It makes me want to rip off my own skin.

For a while, I wondered why she had bothered at all, if it’d just been some sick joke. And then last night I was cleaning my flat, which is a pathetic way to spend your time when your coworkers are busy plotting to save the world, but it’s not quite as pathetic as letting your floor disappear under a pile of dirty boxers. I was hoovering behind my bookshelves, which I hadn’t done in ages, and I found a polaroid that had fallen between the shelf and the wall. I picked it up and dusted it off. It was taken selfie-style, so it was a bit off-center, and it showed me and Martin and a woman about our age. I remember taking the photo. What I don’t remember is that woman’s face, except for the feeling that I’d seen it once, with bright lights shining on both of us and my brother’s voice in my ear.

Pretty straightforward explanation for the whole thing, then. She came for the evidence, took the whole folder of photographs, and missed the one that had fallen behind the shelf. It wasn’t until this morning that I thought of statement #0011206, given by Lawrence Moore about the cousin who wasn’t. The closest thing he had to proof was some old polaroids.

There we go, all tidy and cross-referenced. Just like Sasha would have wanted.

Anyway. That’s why I’m setting aside this photo and why I’ve left a statement to go with it. Because if I don’t, nobody who finds this file will even know who she is. And I just—I think someone should.


End file.
